Why whistleblowers are rare

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My Observer colleague, Nick Cohen, had a terrific column in yesterday’s paper about the Jimmy Savile affair and the BBC’s behaviour in relation to it.

For readers not in the UK I should explain that we now know that Savile was one of the most prolific sexual abusers ever to escape justice. The scale of his crimes, says Cohen, “stands comparison with emperors or tyrants, who engaged in the mass rape of captive subjects. But unlike a dictator, Savile did not require arbitrary power to protect him. All he needed was for society to believe that he was a celebrity: a ‘national treasure’ no one could touch”. (Among other things, Savile was knighted by the Queen for his “charitable” services. And after he died he was laid out in state in Leeds and thousands queued for hours to pay their respects to the deceased hero. Truly, you could not make this stuff up.)

There has been a big inquiry under way, led by a senior retired judge, which is about to issue its report. But we already know that Savile’s grisly predilections and behaviour were well known within the BBC when he was one of its most famous broadcasters. The Observer reported yesterday that the inquiry would reveal that he had abused over a thousand children and young people, many of them on BBC premises.

In the end, two BBC journalists — Liz MacKean, a reporter for the nightly Newsnight current affairs programme and her producer, Meirion Jones — found the evidence that Savile was a voracious paedophile. But their report was spiked by senior BBC management, possibly because, in another corner of the Corporation, there were plans in the works for a major celebratory documentary about Savile the ‘national treasure’.

Given that MacKean and Jones were the first journalists in the BBC to wish to tell the truth about Savile, you’d have thought that they would be regarded as heroines. After all, the BBC’s Royal Charter requires all BBC journalism to strive “to be impartial, accurate and independent”. But that’s not what happened. Here’s how Nick Cohen puts it:

The BBC has not treated its whistleblowers honourably or encouraged others to speak out in the future. Liz MacKean has had enough. Her managers did not fire her. They would not have dared and in any case the British establishment does not work like that.

Instead, they cold-shouldered her. MacKean was miserable. The atmosphere at work was dreadful. The BBC wouldn’t put her on air. She could have stayed, but she did not want to waste her time and talent and end up a bitter old hack. She chose the life of a free journalist instead and went off to work in independent – in all sense of that word – television.

She had been at the BBC for 24 years. Not a single manager came to her leaving party; even though the Pollard inquiry into the BBC’s handling of the Savile affair had vindicated her and Jones’s banned reports; even though every new revelation about Savile and every new celebrity arrest vindicated them further.

Jones, by contrast, stayed at the BBC. He has found a bolt hole at Panorama, which tried to save what was left of the BBC’s honour by producing an exposé of the Savile cover-up. But it is common knowledge that the BBC management will never promote him. His colleagues say he’s had offers to write a book about Savile or to work for independent television, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he took them.

At no point has Chris Patten, the chairman of the BBC Trust, offered Jones or MacKean his support or thanks. If the BBC had run their reports, it would have made all the difference. It could say now that at least it had the integrity to break the news about the crimes of one of its biggest stars. Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones acted in the best interests of the corporation. They were its true defenders. No good did it do them.

This is all par for the course. Moral courage is the scarcest commodity in our society. And whistleblowers are often the embodiment of it. The reason they are detested is partly because they sometimes undermine powerful commercial, organisational or political interests, but mainly because they highlight how compromised and cowardly the rest of us are.

And this is an old, old story. I first began to think about it as a student when I saw a production of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, a scarifying play on this theme. Here’s how Wikipedia summarises the plot:

Doctor Thomas Stockmann is a popular citizen of a small coastal town in Norway. The town has invested a large amount of public and private money towards the development of baths, a project led by Stockmann and his brother, Peter, the Mayor. The town is expecting a surge in tourism and prosperity from the new baths, which are said to be of great medicinal value, and as such, a source of great local pride. Just as the baths are proving successful, Stockmann discovers that waste products from the town’s tannery are contaminating the waters, causing serious illness amongst the tourists. He expects this important discovery to be his greatest achievement, and promptly sends a detailed report to the Mayor, which includes a proposed solution which would come at a considerable cost to the town.

To his surprise, Stockmann finds it difficult to get through to the authorities. They seem unable to appreciate the seriousness of the issue and unwilling to publicly acknowledge and address the problem because it could mean financial ruin for the town. As the conflict develops, the Mayor warns his brother that he should “acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community.” Stockmann refuses to accept this, and holds a town meeting at Captain Horster’s house in order to persuade people that the baths must be closed.

The townspeople — eagerly anticipating the prosperity that the baths will bring — refuse to accept Stockmann’s claims, and his friends and allies, who had explicitly given support for his campaign, turn against him en masse. He is taunted and denounced as a lunatic, an “Enemy of the People.” In a scathing rebuttal of both the Victorian notion of community and the principles of democracy, Stockmann proclaims that, in matters of right and wrong, the individual is superior to the multitude, which is easily led by self-advancing demagogues. Stockmann sums up Ibsen’s denunciation of the masses with the memorable quote “…the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone.” He also says: “A minority may be right; a majority is always wrong.”

Right on.

Obama: relaxed about the NSA

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Here’s Obama, on Air Force One, talking to David Remnick, the Editor of the New Yorker who was writing a pretty friendly piece. Excerpts include these:

After a while, one of the aides led me to the front cabin to talk with the President some more. The week before, Obama had given out the annual Presidential Medals of Freedom. One went to Benjamin C. Bradlee, the editor who built the Washington Post by joining the Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers, in 1971, and who stood behind Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they began publishing the Watergate exposés that led to the fall of the Nixon Presidency. I asked Obama how he could reconcile such an award with his Administration’s aggressive leak investigations, which have ensnared journalists and sources, and its hostility to Edward Snowden’s exposure of the N.S.A.’s blanket surveillance of American and foreign communications.

After a long pause, Obama began to speak of how his first awareness of politics came when, as an eleven-year-old, he went on a cross-country bus trip with his mother and grandmother and, at the end of each day, watched the Watergate hearings on television. “I remember being fascinated by these figures and what was at stake, and the notion that even the President of the United States isn’t above the law,” he said. “And Sam Ervin with his eyebrows, and Inouye, this guy from Hawaii—it left a powerful impression on me. And so, as I got older, when I saw ‘All the President’s Men,’ that was the iconic vision of journalism telling truth to power, and making sure our democracy worked. And I still believe that. And so a lot of the tensions that have existed between my White House and the press are inherent in the institution. The press always wants more, and every White House, including ours, is trying to make sure that the things that we care most about are what’s being reported on, and that we’re not on any given day chasing after fifteen story lines.”

Then Obama insisted that what Snowden did was “not akin to Watergate or some scandal in which there were coverups involved.” The leaks, he said, had “put people at risk” but revealed nothing illegal. And though the leaks raised “legitimate policy questions” about N.S.A. operations, “the issue then is: Is the only way to do that by giving some twenty-nine-year-old free rein to basically dump a mountain of information, much of which is definitely legal, definitely necessary for national security, and should properly be classified?” In Obama’s view, “the benefit of the debate he generated was not worth the damage done, because there was another way of doing it.” Once again, it was the President as Professor-in-Chief, assessing all sides, and observing the tilt of the scales. (The day before his speech last week on reforming the N.S.A., he told me, “I do not have a yes/no answer on clemency for Edward Snowden. This is an active case, where charges have been brought.”)

The coverage of the leaks, Obama complained, paints “a picture of a rogue agency out there running around and breaking a whole bunch of laws and engaging in a ‘domestic spying program’ that isn’t accurate. But what that does is it synchs up with a public imagination that sees Big Brother looming everywhere.” The greater damage, in his view, was the way the leaks heightened suspicions among foreign leaders. Obama enjoyed a good relationship with Angela Merkel, but he admitted that it was undermined by reports alleging that the U.S. tapped her cell phone. This, he said, felt “like a breach of trust and I can’t argue with her being aggravated about that.”

[…]

Obama admitted that the N.S.A. has had “too much leeway to do whatever it wanted or could.” But he didn’t feel “any ambivalence” about the decisions he has made. “I actually feel confident that the way the N.S.A. operates does not threaten the privacy and constitutional rights of Americans and that the laws that are in place are sound, and, because we’ve got three branches of government involved and a culture that has internalized that domestic spying is against the law, it actually works pretty well,” he said. “Over all, five years from now, when I’m a private citizen, I’m going to feel pretty confident that my government is not spying on me.”

So that’s all right then. Steady as we go.

Talking cats and corporate social responsibility

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This morning’s Observer column.

It’s 4.30 on a gloomy winter’s afternoon. I’m sitting with my grandson having one of those conversations in which grandsons explain complicated stuff to their grandads. He is four years old, omniscient in the way that four-year-olds are, and tolerant of my ignorance of important matters.

The conversation turns to computing and he inquires whether I have Talking Tom Cat on my iPad. “No,” I say. “What is it?” He explains that it’s a cool game that his grandma has on her iPad. There is a cat called Tom who listens to what you say to him and then repeats it in a funny voice. Also there’s a dog who does funny things.

So I dig out my iPad and we head over to the app store where, sure enough, Talking Tom Cat 2 is available as a free download. A few minutes later it’s running on my iPad…

Read on to find out what happens next.

Are referenda a good way to make national decisions?

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Robert Cooper is in no doubt about this.

This is easy to answer: no. It is shameful that few political leaders are ready to say so. Democracy is not just about voting. It is also about debate and about responsibility.

Debate is necessary to understand complex issues. We invented representative democracy because debate is time-consuming and it is not practical in a modern state to assemble the whole population in market squares to debate issues. (In Athens the people were able to do this because citizens were few and they had helots and women to do the work.) Under the system of government “by the people”, the people choose the government and then hold it accountable when they don’t like what it does. If referendums are “more democratic” than decisions by parliament, why not make decisions about taxation or electricity prices by referendum, as has been tried in California (and then the lights went out)? When bad decisions are made in this way, who takes responsibility?

For years, both parties resisted calls for  a referendum on capital punishment because they feared there would be a majority in favour of it. Over time and through long debates, parliament became convinced by the evidence that capital punishment had no deterrent value and that innocent people had been hanged. Yet they feared that, in a referendum, the debate would be shallow and voters would follow prejudice rather than the evidence.

The referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) showed how difficult it can be to generate a serious debate on matters that are important but complicated where mastery of the detail demands time.

Yep.

Dan Ellsberg on Edward Snowden

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Hi Reddit,

I am Daniel Ellsberg, the former State and Defense Department official who leaked 7,000 pages of Top Secret documents on the Vietnam War to the New York Times and 19 other papers in 1971. Recently, I co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Yesterday, we announced Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower, will be joining our board of directors!

Here’s our website: https://pressfreedomfoundation.org

I believe that Edward Snowden has done more to support and defend the Constitution—in particular, the First and Fourth Amendments—than any member of Congress or any other employee or official of the Executive branch, up to the president: every one of whom took that same oath, which many of them have violated.

Ask me anything.

Here’s proof it’s me: https://twitter.com/DanielEllsberg/status/423520429676826624

If you want to take action against mass surveillance, visit TheDayWeFightBack and demand reform in Congress on February 11th.

Source

Mass surveillance: an “insurance policy”

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I was struck by this passage in an admirable blog post by Ray Corrigan.

The latest from the NSA is that they now seem to be admitting (in spite of previous claims that this mass surveillance stopped 54 major terror attacks it didn’t really stop any, but may possibly have provided secondary supportive evidence in relation to one) that the best argument they can come up with is mass data collection might be useful as an “insurance policy”. What?! An insurance policy?! The infrastructure of mass surveillance might be useful in the future, somehow, to someone?

The relevant passage in the NSA testimony reads:

While Inglis conceded in his NPR interview that at most one terrorist attack might have been foiled by NSA’s bulk collection of all American phone data – a case in San Diego that involved a money transfer from four men to al-Shabaab in Somalia – he described it as an “insurance policy” against future acts of terrorism.

“I’m not going to give that insurance policy up, because it’s a necessary component to cover a seam that I can’t otherwise cover,” Inglis said.

Reflections on the revolution in automobiles

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As readers of my newspaper column know, I think that it would be hard to overestimate the significance of Google’s self-driving car. This is not because I expect to find autonomous vehicles on our roads any time soon, but because it signals an urgent need to revise our assumptions about what machines can and cannot do.

If you’d asked me ten years ago what tasks would lie beyond the capacity of computers I would confidently have included driving safely in a crowded urban environment in my list. Brooding on this over the course of the last few months I was coming to think that perhaps this judgement might have been a reflection of my ignorance of robotics at the time. But then, reading Erik Brynjolfsson’s and Andrew McAfee’s new book, The Second Machine Age, I was pointed to a book by Frank Levy and Richard Murnane published in 2004 and entitled The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market, in which they focussed on the division between human and machine labour.

Levy and Murnane put information processing tasks on a spectrum

At one end are tasks like arithmetic that require only the application of well-understood rules. Since computers are really good at following rules, it follows that they should arithmetic and similar tasks. And not just arithmetic.

For example, a person’s credit score is a good general predictor of whether they’ll pay pack their mortgage as promised… So the decision about whether or not to give a mortgage can be effectively boiled down to a rule.

But Levy and Murnane thought that tasks involving pattern recognition would be beyond computers. And they cite driving a car as a paradigmatic example:

As the driver makes his left turn against traffic, he confronts a wall of images and sounds generated by oncoming cars, traffic lights, storefronts, billboards, trees, and a traffic policeman. Using his knowledge, he must estimate the size and position of each of these objects and the likelihood that they pose a hazard… Articulating this knowledge and embedding it in computer software for all but highly structures situations are at present enormously difficult talks… Computers cannot easily substitute for humans in [jobs like driving].

So I wasn’t the only person a decade ago who doubted that computers could drive.

This is the conjecture that the Google self-driving car refutes. There’s a terrific piece in the New Yorker about the genesis and execution of the Google project which, among other things, illuminates the height of the mountain that the Google team had to climb.

In the beginning, [Sergey] Brin and [Larry] Page presented Thrun’s team with a series of darpa-like challenges. They managed the first in less than a year: to drive a hundred thousand miles on public roads. Then the stakes went up. Like boys plotting a scavenger hunt, Brin and Page pieced together ten itineraries of a hundred miles each. The roads wound through every part of the Bay Area—from the leafy lanes of Menlo Park to the switchbacks of Lombard Street. If the driver took the wheel or tapped the brakes even once, the trip was disqualified. “I remember thinking, How can you possibly do that?” Urmson told me. “It’s hard to game driving through the middle of San Francisco.”

It took the team a year and a half to master Page and Brin’s ten hundred-mile road trips.

The first one ran from Monterey to Cambria, along the cliffs of Highway 1. “I was in the back seat, screaming like a little girl,” Levandowski told me. One of the last started in Mountain View, went east across the Dumbarton Bridge to Union City, back west across the bay to San Mateo, north on 101, east over the Bay Bridge to Oakland, north through Berkeley and Richmond, back west across the bay to San Rafael, south to the mazy streets of the Tiburon Peninsula, so narrow that they had to tuck in the side mirrors, and over the Golden Gate Bridge to downtown San Francisco. When they finally arrived, past midnight, they celebrated with a bottle of champagne. Now they just had to design a system that could do the same thing in any city, in all kinds of weather, with no chance of a do-over. Really, they’d just begun.

The Google car has now driven more than half a million miles without causing an accident, which is, says the New Yorker writer, Burkhard Bilger, about twice as far as the average American driver goes before crashing.

Of course, the computer has always had a human driver to take over in tight spots. Left to its own devices, Thrun says, it could go only about fifty thousand miles on freeways without a major mistake. Google calls this the dog-food stage: not quite fit for human consumption. “The risk is too high,” [Sebastian] Thrun says. “You would never accept it.” The car has trouble in the rain, for instance, when its lasers bounce off shiny surfaces.

Just for the record, this (human) driver also has trouble in the rain. I’ve been driving for over 40 years, and in that time have only had one minor accident (I ran into the car in front at about 5mph when disembarking from a car ferry), so on paper I’m a fairly competent driver. But when driving in Cambridge (a town full of cyclists) on wet dark winter’s nights I’m perpetually worried that I will not see a cyclist who’s not wearing reflective gear or a walker who suddenly rushes across a pedestrian crossing.

So one anecdote in the Bilger piece struck home. A Google engineer told him about driving one night on a dark country road when the car suddenly and inexplicably slowed down.

“I was thinking, What the hell? It must be a bug,” he told me. “Then we noticed the deer walking along the shoulder.” The car, unlike its riders, could see in the dark.

The other morning, after a cyclist suddenly appeared apparently from nowhere on a city crossing, I found myself thinking that I could really use a car with that kind of extra-sensory perception.

And of course this is how the fruits of the Google research and development will first appear — as extra sensors designed to alert human drivers. Volvo already do this in some of their models which detect when a car is veering across motorway lanes and infer that the driver may be getting sleepy. We will see a lot more of this before long. And I, for one, will welcome it.

The antisocial side of geek elitism

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This morning’s Observer column.

Just under a year ago, Rebecca Solnit, a writer living in San Francisco, wrote a sobering piece in the London Review of Books about the Google Bus, which she viewed as a proxy for the technology industry just down the peninsula in Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino.

“The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening,” she wrote, “but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course Wi-Fi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.”

The aesthetics of sloooooow motion photography

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This astonishing, haunting video is the work of an extraordinary photographic artist, Adam Magyar. There’s a terrific profile of him by Joshua Hammer on Matter. For this video he persuaded the German manufacturer Optronis to lend him one of its $16,000, high-performance industrial video cameras—used in crash tests and robotic-arm studies. The Optronis shoots high-resolution images at astonishing speeds: up to 100,000 frames per second, compared to 24 frames per second in a traditional film camera.

Instead of standing on a platform shooting passengers speeding past him, Magyar now positioned himself inside the moving subway car, recording stationary commuters on the platform as train and camera rolled into the station. Again, the ghost of Einstein permeates these images, and again, he was warping time: Magyar shot the footage at 56 times normal speed, turning 12-second blurs into nearly 12-minute films of excruciating slowness.

Amazing stuff.